If You Can’t Stand The Heat

Having kids makes you do some weird ass crazy things. And I’m not talking about moving out your porn DVDs to make way for Baby Einsteins. Or changing the classic rock discs in your car for The Wiggles and Barney. Though, thanks to my mother-in-law I do occasionally pop in a big band version of The Farmer In The Dell that’s got such fat, fat horns, it’s completely spoiled me for any other rendition of the nursery tune.

But I digress … In this case, I’m talking about something still stranger and more perverse. I’m talking about the complex task of applying heat to food-type ingredients — otherwise known as cooking. That’s right. My child has driven me to cook.

You’re probably wondering what’s the big whoop, right? Who doesn’t go all June Cleaver once they pop out a kid? Except that me in the kitchen doing something more culinarily advanced than picking up the phone to make a reservation or place an order for takeout is about as likely as the Lubavitcher Rebbe announcing he’s just polished off a BLT and now he’s going for the lobster. I think there’s actually a restraining order barring me from touching anything in the kitchen other than the light switch and even that’s only under strict supervision. This is necessary for the safety and protection of myself and others because I am uniformly, and widely, known for being a hazard in the kitchen.

The reputation is not without merit. In high school, I tried to show my boyfriend some love by baking him mint chocolate brownies. They were so godawful, buzzards refused them. It really says something when birds that routinely dine on roadkill give it a pass. The really vexing thing: the brownies came out of a box! I mean, who can’t add an egg and oil to the sifted contents of a cardboard box, give it a stir and pop it in the oven? That’s like 99 percent idiot-proof. And there’s me — the 1 percent outlying idiot. In retrospect, though, even if I’d whipped up brownies the likes of which have not been tasted outside Magnolia Bakery, my boyfriend would probably have appreciated something else, like a blowjob. But he ended up getting my virginity, so botched brownies aside, I’m thinking he still came out ahead.

Still, that was nowhere near as colossal a cooking snafu as the time I made toast … and set my mother’s kitchen on fire. This was back in the pre-Netflix days when people actually stood in line to see Tim Curry as the “sweet transvestite” in the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rocky Horror was the ultimate audience participation event, and, until I moved to New York and got acquainted with the performance rantings of Karen Finley and Diamanda Galas, it was the closest this sheltered suburban girl had ever come to anything remotely “edgy.” If you’ve seen the original Fame “I wanna live forever…” movie, you’ve gotten a taste of Rocky Horror even if you’ve never dressed up as a saucy maid and taken a jump to the left and then a step to the riiiiiight. Where I got into trouble was in making preparations for the moment in the film when someone calls for a toast and everyone throws toast at the screen. It sounds lame now, but in the prehistoric days before you could grab movies from iTunes and watch them on your iPhone, we took our fun where we could get it.

There is nothing complicated about making toast, so I didn’t think I had to stand there for the two minutes it would take the bread to brown. I still don’t know why exactly the toast caught fire. Or why our smoke detectors didn’t start blaring. But the important thing to understand is that because I was busy on the other side of the house, it was quite some time before I realized it was on fire. I’m embarrassed to admit that I still don’t know what you’re supposed to do with an electrical fire. But when I saw the flames licking my mother’s prized yellow cabinets, I just doused the toaster with water and hoped for the best. I did put the fire out, and was in the process of cleaning off the soot when my mom unexpectedly walked in the door. It really is heartbreakingl to watch a grown woman weep over melted formica.

Mom always said, “If you can read, you can cook.” But there are those in my family who seriously wonder if I’m not culinarily dyslexic. Last Thanksgiving, my one task was to bring apple pie with some vanilla ice cream and whipped topping. And it’s not like anyone was expecting me to bake the apple pie. Nooooo. All I had to do was drive to Publix, find the frozen food section and fish a Mrs. Smith’s out of the freezer. No brainer! Except that while I was scoping out the pie situation, I was also on the lookout for frozen quiches I could serve at our annual family brunch the Saturday after. (And yes, I have that catered.) I grabbed a pie and an armful of quiches, hit the checkout and didn’t think anymore about it until we all sat down for turkey dinner.

“Didn’t we ask you to get apple pie?” my sister Shari called from the kitchen where she was preheating the oven so the pies would be ready after the absolutely amazing multi-course meal she and her husband actually did cook — from scratch.

“Yeah …. I got apple. Why?”

“No –” Shari came into the dining room, waving the box of frozen pie. “You got peach. See?” And she waved the box some more.

It doesn’t matter that everyone loved the peach pie; that there was nothing left but crumbs after dessert. This the juicy stuff of family lore. And it’ll get trotted out every turkey day for years to come … until Shari is too old and senile to remember the tale. Given that Shari’s in her 30s, I’ll be living this down for decades yet to come. For next Thanksgiving, someone else is now in charge of pie. I think I’m in charge of ice cubes. Or toothpicks. It doesn’t matter. I’m clearly off the food detail.

My problem is that I just don’t pay attention. As Shari has often pointed out, “Nowhere in the recipe does it say, Go do your laundry, Organize your sock drawer or Spend an hour on the elliptical machine at the gym.” It’s true, I’ve never seen that in any food prep instructions, though the ones I usually read say: Remove over-wrap, microwave on High for 4 minutes.

In many ways, I’ve worn my haplessness as a badge of distinction. It says: I’m not the traditional woman, not the traditional wife, not the traditional mother. I took pride in not knowing how to fix anything more complex than instant oatmeal, using it as a hedge, I suppose, against falling into suburban, gender stereotypes. I’d proudly wave it off with a jaunty My husband does the cooking whenever anyone would ask. As if that made us the Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed of Orlando. Only now I was faced with a very traditional Mom Challenge — how to get my sweets-loving boy, who clamored for cake and cookies at every turn, to eat a vegetable.

It was my friend Laurie (not Anderson) who basically shamed me recently into dusting off my candy apple red Kitchen Aid mixer — the one I registered for four years ago when Stewart and I got married because I thought it would look great on the counter (kinetic kitchen sculpture!) and have never, ever used. This is a woman who — long before Jessica Seinfeld — snuck spinach into brownies and pureed blueberries to make purple muffins so her kids would eat healthy. Me? I microwave. I open cans. I spread peanut butter on bread. I remove frozen pizza from its box, then stand back so my more kitchen-savvy husband can set the timer and the temperature and then put it in the oven. Organic pizza, but still. It’s a wonder no one’s called DCFS yet.

So when yet another friend mentioned that a Cooking Light recipe for chocolate chip zucchini bread was a smash hit with her kids, I decided that, although it was risky — possibly a suicide mission — perhaps it was time for me to go back in the kitchen.

I entered the kitchen with all spring-loaded tension of a special forces unit on a commando raid. I moved carefully … and tried not to blow anything up. I measured and mixed. And mixed and measured. Finally, I had a batter studded with chocolate chips that actually included an entire zucchini. I gingerly slid it into the oven, set the timer and watched the clock. I didn’t even peek into my sock drawer.

The next day, after his lunch, I cut a slice for Fletcher. It tasted okay to me. But I wasn’t the target audience. I watched him break off a piece with his fingers and put it in his mouth. He chewed … thoughtfully, for a 2-year-old. I hovered … awaiting his verdict with the giddy, nervous anticipation of a class of high-school seniors waiting for the last bell to ring before summer.

“Mommy –” he said, grinning through chocolate crumbs. “Good cake!”
Jackpot! Honestly, I couldn’t have been happier if I’d come up straight 7s on a Vegas slot machine.

Maybe this cooking thing isn’t so difficult. Maybe I’ll even try it again. But I’ll keep the fire extinguisher handy. Just in case.